How Is Referrer Information Reported?

When a fan visits your Linkfire link, we automatically detect where that person came from. This is called referrer information and is a valuable tool to see how your campaign performs across different traffic sources.

However, this technique is not perfect for two reasons:

Sometimes traffic sources do not supply referrer information. In those cases, we display the referrer info as being "Direct".

Referrer info cannot differentiate between different sources inside the same platform. This means that while you can see which traffic came from Facebook, you cannot tell the difference between traffic from two different Facebook pages.

For these reasons, we recommend using Linkfire's channels feature. This lets you accurately determine the relative performance of your different promotions.

How different traffic sources are displayed inside Linkfire

The below table shows how Linkfire reports referrer information for different traffic sources. Note that some will result in a Direct report, and so we especially recommend using channels when promoting on those platforms.

Traffic source

Referrer info

Facebook messenger / mobile

facebook

Facebook messenger / desktop

facebook

Facebook wall / mobile

facebook

Facebook wall / desktop

facebook

WhatsApp

Direct

Snapchat

Direct

Instagram Ads

instagram.com

Instagram Messenger

instagram.com

YouTube ad/card/annotation

youtube.com

YouTube description

youtube.com

Twitter

Twitter

Twitter DM

Twitter

Google Plus / desktop

google-plus

Google Hangout / desktop (http)

Direct

Google Hangout / desktop (https)

Google

These results are determined by in-house testing. If you need to know about other traffic sources, let us know and we can expand our tests.